Landmark AI project has no prospect of meeting renewable energy promise

A landmark AI development billed as delivering jobs and prosperity has misrepresented its plans to channel a nuclear reactor’s worth of power to a site in rural Scotland, a Guardian investigation has found.

- Aisha Down

When it was announced in January, the government promised an £8.2bn AI datacentre complex in Lanarkshire, built by the US firm CoreWeave and the Scottish company DataVita, would be powered entirely from on-site renewables and built by 2030.

The AI datacentre complex represented a large part of UK ambitions to keep up in the global AI race, by building the infrastructure that underpins artificial intelligence. A central plank was the site’s ability to power itself.

But documents obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests and analysis of public records suggest there is no prospect of meeting that goal. The Guardian has internal correspondence showing even as they publicly promised the site would have up to 1GW of “new energy infrastructure”, the government and site developers privately acknowledged an “issue” with “power provision” and that this would not happen.

In response to Guardian questions, the government said the site would connect to the grid. This means it will join a years-long queue or jump ahead of hundreds of other projects vying for a connection. An official said the site’s needs would still be met “overwhelmingly” with renewables.

The findings raise critical doubts over the UK’s ability to provide the extraordinary energy required.

The biggest tech companies are ploughing hundreds of billions of dollars into building AI datacentres in the belief that AI will transform the global economy, meaning the centres pay for themselves. The question of whether AI is a boom or bubble largely rests on these projects.

This is not the first sign of problems in the UK industry. In March, the Guardian reported that a series of projects announced in recent years were “phantom investments”, with the government failing to examine claims of job creation or audit multi-billion-pound sums.